Understanding DevOps and why it’s important

If you’re a developer, you have probably started to hear the term DevOps being thrown around. If you haven’t, well, you will soon be hearing it around the office. Someone in your upper management will hear about it in a conference somewhere and come back asking his company’s people if they need to consider it. Soon there will a team formulated to discuss implementation of DevOps. What we are saying is, this is the right time to know what DevOps is. We all remember what happened when ‘Agile’ became the most popular model for development. Most people at the beginning had no idea what Agile meant and how they needed to change the way they work.

What exactly is DevOps?
DevOps is a new way of thinking about development and a new way of development itself. There has always been a huge divide between the development team and the operations team. The development team takes complete control of the development. It is their job to design the system, build the system, test the system, and then deliver it to the operations team. The operations team receives the fully developed and quality tested product and learns how to use it. Then the operations team uses it for their work and reports any errors of mistakes that pop up to the development team.

DevOps, as the name suggests, is the combination of development and operations. DevOps is based on the understanding that in order to build the most efficient systems it is important to involve the operations people in the development cycle. Too many of us have used software and wondered why it was designed so badly or why we had to work so hard to mold our work according to it. This disconnect between what the users need and what the product delivers has long been a problem in the industry. DevOps is a way of working that understands that while operations cannot develop, developers cannot develop the right thing either without the right inputs.

A very different development cycle
In DevOps, the operations team doesn’t move in once the development is complete. Instead, they are there from the start. They help design the system, they even help in development, they help in quality assurance and much more. The advantages of these are obvious; the product that is build is exactly what is needed to work at the highest efficiency in real world scenarios.

There’s also another huge advantage – the operations team is also much better at utilizing the product. Digital solutions are only useful if the users know how to use the powerful toolset they offer. By including the operations team right from the start they gain a deep understanding of how everything works and allows them to exploit the solution to their full potential. Instead of waiting to be trained after the solution has been developed, they see it being developed and develop an understanding not just of the UI but the underlying infrastructure as well. DevOps is the future because it results in the best development and deployment.